Tag Archives: Economics

Easterlin’s paradox or why economic growth does not make us happier In Easterlin’s (1974) seminal paper, he finds that within any one country, in cross sectional studies, there was a strong correlation between income and happiness. One would easily conclude that money can buy happiness. However, looking at a cross section of countries, one comes to a different conclusion … For 10 of the 14 countries surveyed, the happiness ranking is about the same, even...

So much for value-free economics Back in 1992, New Jersey raised the minimum wage by 18 per cent while its neighbour state, Pennsylvania, left its minimum wage unchanged. Unemployment in New Jersey should — according to mainstream economics textbooks — have increased relative to Pennsylvania. However, when economists David Card and Alan Krueger gathered information on fast food restaurants in the two states, it turned out that unemployment had actually...

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as...

Modern macro — a total waste​ of time While one can understand that some of the elements in DSGE models seem to appeal to Keynesians at first sight, after closer examination, these models are in fundamental contradiction to Post-Keynesian and even traditional Keynesian thinking. The DSGE model is a model in which output is determined in the labour market as in New Classical models and in which aggregate demand plays only a very secondary role, even in the...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Snot corn! That’s crop scientist Sarah Taber’s nickname for the variety of maize native Mexicans cultivated that allowed it to grow very high in very poor soil. According to a genetic sequencing published by UC Davis researchers, the secret is in the mucus-like goop around roots that are out in the open. The bacteria in the goop allow the plant to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, effectively fertilizing itself from the air....

According to Abba Lerner, the purpose of public debt is “to achieve a rate of interest which results in the most desirable level of investment.” He also maintained that an application of Functional Finance will have a tendency to balance the budget in the long run: There is no reason for assuming that, as a result of the continued application of Functional Finance to maintain full employment, the government must always be borrowing more money and increasing the national debt...

Italia: troppo grande per fallire, troppo grande per scamparla L’euro ha tolto la possibilità ai Governi nazionali di gestire in modo significativo le loro economie e in Italia, proprio come in Grecia un paio di anni fa, le persone hanno dovuto pagare i veri costi delle erronee e concomitanti politiche di austerità. Durante l’ultimo decennio, il dispiegarsi delle ripetute crisi economiche in Eurolandia ha mostrato al di là di ogni dubbio che l’euro non è...

IMF blames Germany for increased crash risk Der Chefvolkswirt des Internationalen Währungsfonds (IWF), Maurice Obstfeld, weist Deutschland eine Mitverantwortung zu für die Spannungen in der internationalen Handelspolitik. Zudem trage Deutschland dazu bei, dass das Risiko einer neuerlichen Finanzkrise steige. „Alle Länder, auch Deutschland, stehen in der Verantwortung, die globale Finanzstabilität zu schützen“, schreibt Obstfeld in einem Gastbeitrag für...

[embedded content] The balanced budget paradox is probably one of the most devastating phenomena haunting our economies. The harder politicians — usually on the advice of establishment economists — try to achieve balanced budgets for the public sector, the less likely they are to succeed in their endeavour. And the more the citizens have to pay for the concomitant austerity policies these wrong-headed politicians and economists recommend as “the sole solution.” One of the most...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]My Interest In The New Goldman Sachs CEO Goes Pretty Much Exactly As You Would Expect…: you see a funny human-interest story, I see a scenario that is potentially helpful for research purposes…